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The article “Loosing face” published in the Economists´ print edition on November 6th 2008, talks about companies using social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to make publicity and that even though this is a quite effective way to make advertising for free, it may also be a “source of damaging publicity” (l.4), and describes two situations that happened to British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.

First of all the author introduces the problems the two companies are facing. Whereas in Virgin 13 crewmembers were posting nasty comments about customers and the company’s safety measures and thus were fired, BA was investigating some of their employees for criticizing BA customers in Facebook postings.

In the following it is said that even if some customers aren’t very exquisite, this is not an excuse to allow that employees criticize them trough any way or media.

As it is described, the PR managers of both companies became aware of the “publicity” that was circulating, one through a press release and the other one after several passengers´ complaints which shows the lack of interest of the companies to avoid similar situations.
Therefore, the conslusion is the recommendation of a PR specialist to both companies to visit these “ online watering holes” (l.36) in order to prevent such embarrassing situations.